Boats are moored along Regent's Canal by Victoria Park in the Tower Hamlets district of London. Photo / José Sarmento Matos, for The Washington Post
It takes only minutes for Jenny Poulton to get her house under way.
On an August afternoon, she pulled up steel stakes, locked the cats inside and was off, moving her colourful 60-foot canalboat from one spot on this suburban London waterway to another, as the law declares she must do at least every two weeks.
“This will do nicely,” Poulton said two hours and three hand-operated locks later, cutting the engine at a weedy stretch of bank.
It was within bicycle range of groceries, pubs, the Harlow train station and a 40-minute commute to her part-time teaching job in the city - and home for the next fortnight.
This is Poulton’s rhythm as a “continuous cruiser”, a booming population of nomadic boaters who live on Britain’s canals and navigable rivers without paying for a permanent mooring spot, sometimes in central London, flanked by some of Britain’s most exorbitantly expensive real estate.
They’ve been a waterway fixture for decades, a perpetual-motion village of eccentric boaters, drawn by the lifestyle or driven to it by Britain’s soaring housing costs.
But now, Poulton and others say their life afloat is under threat.
In November, the Canal and River Trust (CRT), the non-profit organisation charged with managing 3220km of historic canals and rivers in England and Wales, will announce an overhaul of regulations and licensing fees that itinerant boaters fear could force them off the water.
Tensions have been rising between the managers of Britain’s canals, others who use them, and the nomadic narrowboaters, revered by some as bohemian travellers and disdained by others as maritime squatters.
“I think there’s this feeling that we’re getting away with something, that we’ve found a loophole to live cheap,” said Poulton, who spends about half of her time in the posh waterways of central London.
“Yes, some people are out here because they can’t afford anything else, but many of us are out here because we love it.”
Among the changes believed to be under consideration: higher licence fees, permit systems to limit the number of continuous cruisers in some areas and rules that would require them to travel more kilometres each year, potentially splitting them from shoreside jobs and schools where children are enrolled.
CRT said it was too early to speculate on specific recommendations that will emerge from the independent commission that is reviewing the rules.
An update of regulations and enforcement powers is desperately needed, the agency said, to meet rising demand for space throughout the 200-year-old canal network, particularly in and around London.
There are more than 8500 nomads on the water, making up a quarter of all boats. In London, itinerant boats now outnumber by two to one those who pay thousands of pounds a year for fixed mooring spots.
The total number of licensed boats - including commercial vessels, residential boats with permanent private moorings and continuous cruisers - climbed 15% in the past decade, and the number of continuous cruisers more than doubled, according to CRT figures.
“When you have a finite amount of canal space you can have contentions among the users,” said Matthew Symonds, the head of CRT boating programmes. “The growth has been significant in some areas.”
Other recreational boaters, those who keep their boats in marinas or private moorings but cruise the network, say nomads hog limited mooring spaces and that some flout the rule to move every fortnight. Waterfront landowners and developers bemoan dilapidated boats and, at times, unfriendly boaters.
“We’ve had more problems with it since Covid and the cost-of-living crisis,” said Ian Burrows, a local government official who oversaw the recent removal of dozens of boats that had colonised a stretch of the Thames in front of Hampton Court Palace.
Andrew Hamilton, a former lockkeeper on the Thames, said asking liveaboards to move along was a constant chore.
“Some people would just stay,” Hamilton said. “The moorings would be blocked by people, some of whom were destitute and some of whom were simply bloody-minded.”
Continuous cruisers say the overcrowding complaints are overblown, and that boaters should expect London’s waterways to be as crowded as its streets are for cars, and subways are for passengers.
The cruisers have their own complaints about CRT’s management of the waterways, including a lack of affordable mooring space, inadequate or inoperable sewage pump-out stations, and riverbanks in need of dredging.
Nomads see themselves as a valid constituency, albeit one without fixed addresses. In being targeted, many say, snobbery is afoot. Or afloat.
“There’s always a bit of a conflict between scruffy boats and shiny boats,” Alain Gough-Olaya, 39, a psychiatric nurse, said aboard his not-so-shiny narrowboat on the edge of London’s Islington neighbourhood, a cat winding between his legs in a cabin lined with books and cooking pots.
“It often seems the CRT is saying you can’t be on the water so much because you’re the wrong sort of person.”
CRT is not trying to rid the canals of nomadic boaters, Symonds said. He agrees with those who credit a resurgence of liveaboards in the 1960s with bringing life back to canals that had become bleakly moribund after cargo transport disappeared earlier in the century.
“We love having boats of all sorts on the canals,” he said. “We just have to manage the network fairly for everyone.”
Only a minority of itinerant boaters violate the rules, Symonds acknowledged, but all add demand on the locks, pump-out stations and other canal infrastructure.
Last year, CRT began imposing a 10% surcharge on cruisers over the yearly licence fee all boaters pay. It will rise to 25% by 2028.
“It’s just a matter of how much you’re on the water,” Symonds said. “Continuous cruisers are always on the water.”
Many boaters say any cost increase puts them closer to a tipping point.
“The price thing is really scary for me,” said JoJo Case, 37, a narrowboater tied up along London’s Regent’s Canal.
After years of rented rooms and friends’ couches, Case bought a blue 15m narrowboat last year for about US$36,000, by taking out a bank loan and maxing out credit cards. It’s the first property of her own.
“Owning a house was never going to be my story,” Case said, petting her cat as joggers huffed by on the canal path. “It’s important to have alternative lifestyles when rent payments are so high.”
But the changes she worries most about are rules that could move her out of reach of the north London studio where she earns a modest living selling textile art.
The law states that boaters without home moorings must move every two weeks but is vague on how far. At present, Case shifts spots twice a month within the capital’s roughly 160km of CRT canals, often having to moor two or three abreast with other boats doing the same thing.
The CRT contends that such shuffling within one general area violates the spirit of the law, which calls for boats to be used “bona fide for navigation”.
Currently, the trust applies a loose standard of moving at least 32km a year. The new rules could increase that distance or stipulate that moorings must be more spread out.
“I’d probably have to leave London entirely,” Case said.
For Marcus Trower, a former plumber, life aboard the condemned 12m narrowboat he bought and restored 15 years ago is an upgrade from squatting in abandoned industrial buildings. It’s also part of a rich tradition he is fighting for as co-chair of the National Bargee Travellers Association, an advocacy group.
“You don’t find the British narrowboat anywhere else in the world, and we’re continuing a history that existed for 200 years,” Trower said from his spot on the River Kennet near Reading.
He is home-schooling his 8-year-old son aboard, and getting ready to head towards London, two weeks at a time.
“They’ve been making it harder and harder on us,” he said. “But we’re still here.”
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